


place bets on an empty hand

by orphan_account



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: ???? - Freeform, M/M, my sympathy for michael is getting to be a problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 21:49:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5886583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>persephone must always go back down into the shadows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	place bets on an empty hand

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from [holy roman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_mGVWIoYvs&index=1&list=PL576B2B66F8F043B7) by the get up kids. 
> 
> \------------------
> 
> i feel weird about this one, kids. it's wandering and over-introspective and disjointed, i think. but oh well.

In the beginning, there was no Lester or Brad or Moses or Macauley twins or Amanda or Tracey or Jimmy. For nearly a whole year in the very earliest days, it was just Trevor and Michael. 

Now, it’s true enough that four months of that year were spent with Trevor in jail after a botched job that left Trevor where he’d started and Michael with contacts that were now too spooked to hire him. People with bigger things to worry about than a few months in jail and a couple thousand dollars. And it's true that that year is full of false starts and half-secrets that do not color the rest of their time together, but still. That time was just theirs. 

And those four months without Trevor were more painful than Michael expected them to be, though they had only known each other for a handful of weeks before their violent parting. It shouldn't matter as much as it does. He shouldn't want to wait for him as much as he does. But he's twenty-three and unaccustomed to thinking about himself in any constructive way.

So Michael waits. He sells weed, mostly, to fund his stay on the northern side of the border and tells himself that it’s just because this kid went to jail for him and it’s the least he can do, and anyways, he’s all out of places to go and rob blind anyways. He may have oversold himself to Trevor ever so slightly as far as experience and connections go, but it's fine. Trevor has fire, has verve, has passion overflowing even then, and Michael loves it. 

Trevor goes to jail in the spring and returns in the winter. Persephone comes down from the bright surface and men fall to her feet wherever she walks. The dark days end and they’re back together, stealing cars and making a few thousand dollars at a time, looking for a way to get in a foothold in the world of crime that seems just out of reach. Michael is young enough then that he thinks there’s nothing more than curiosity that draws his gaze to the gentle swoop of Trevor’s cupid’s bow, nothing outside of usual nervousness that makes his cheeks burn when Trevor glances at him over the roof of a car he’s jimmying the lock to. There are times, now, when he longs for that naiveté. 

He knows something is up with Trevor, but he can’t quite place it. Something thrums just under his skin, something that keeps him always at Michael’s side, always in tune with him, like two copper wires connected to the same spark. Looking back, of course, it seems silly that he didn’t know then, from the first moment he and Trevor locked eyes, but no one has ever accused him of being the sharpest crayon in the box. 

So for several months, he observes Trevor with a sort of bemused detachment. He can sense there’s something between them that makes them more than your average brothers-in-arms, but he doesn’t really puzzle over it. He just lets things play out and figures he’ll trust Trevor while he’s got him. If he has hazy, confusing dreams of amber colored eyes and wide shoulders and brown hair shining with fat snowflakes, they don’t linger long enough to bother him.

And then Trevor kisses him. 

It’s not that it’s out of nowhere--really, Michael should have seen it coming. They had been laughing at something he’s long forgotten, laughing so hard they were crying, half-drunk and still buzzing from the successful completion of a minor job for a guy who worked for a guy who would within months lead them to Lester. But they stop laughing and Trevor is wiping his eyes and still grinning and Michael is grinning too and he elbows Trevor a little and Trevor elbows him back and when Michael turns to make some indignant comment it dies in his throat unsaid because Trevor is less than an inch away and. It just happens. 

He feels like he’s falling off a very steep cliff. Their lips come together and Trevor catches him, one hand on his jaw, the other on the back of his neck, steadying him and keeping him from hitting the canyon floor and coming apart at the seams of his being. Trevor kisses him and kisses him and kisses him and Michael doesn’t think about what any of it means, doesn’t think about his own identity, his sense of being slipping through his fingers and away, away to somewhere he won’t be able to reach it again. 

He feels like such an idiot, such a fucking brute when Trevor has to show him how to work him open on his fingers, shows him places to touch that he didn’t even know existed, places that make Trevor say his name like he’s choking on it, and Michael has never wanted anything more in his life than this moment. 

In the morning, he splashes water on his face and Trevor acts normal and Michael is relieved because it means nothing has to be different. Not that anything _is_ different--Michael is still straight, still a criminal, still who he thought he was before. 

Things escalate, as they always do. Their jobs get more serious, more dangerous, and Michael sinks deeper into drinks and Trevor into drugs, but the one thing that is reliable as ever is their desire. Michael can barely keep his hands off Trevor when they’re in decent company and doesn’t bother to when he can help it. It’s easy to tell himself it’s just stress or adrenaline or limited option that drive them together, but even then, he knew it wasn't all the way true. 

Then the spring comes. Persephone follows the rules, and she’s gone. Trevor goes home after a phone call that ends with him getting higher than Michael has ever seen him get and breaking every bit of glass he could get his hand on in their motel room. Michael goes to Lester and stays with him for those months, doing lots of nothing while the grass flows over and rainstorms beat down the doors. They’re on the precipice of harvest season when Trevor comes back, stony and somehow changed. Michael asks after the brother he only heard of once or twice and Trevor tells him he’s never had a brother. 

It ends as unexpectedly as it starts--not the sex, of course. That goes on for years and years and years, but the glowing, the love, the tenderness. Other things stay; their loyalty, their passion, the indelible fire between them, but Trevor is no longer a source of confusion for Michael. He doesn’t threaten the ever-delicate thread of Michael’s core--Trevor is as good as Michael’s brother. If there was ever anything more between them, he quickly forgets it. 

But years go by and the promise is not honored. Persephone stays beneath the earth. Michael marries Amanda and Trevor is gone again, physically present though he may be. He’s in the jaws of the sweltering summer, lost in a world Michael can’t reach into, wrapped up in layers of drugs and drink and pain as potent as any substance, and all that’s left to do is wait until snow soothes it away.

Michael takes refuge in his family, which grows slowly but surely. It probably means something that it’s snowing the night Tracey is born, but he’s no oracle. He can’t decipher the signs. Amanda, luckily, never eats the pomegranate seeds. She can only live on the edge of their world, flitting between seasons, belonging to neither. She is not held to the cycle like he is, and neither are his children. He begins to dream of a place free of the seasons altogether. 

So they go to where it’s always summer. The circle should be broken, but instead it’s just suppressed, still winding and tugging inside of Michael--though now there is no change in the wind to precipitate it, just an unexpected turning of mood, a faint itching in his fingers, things too small to place. 

He sinks into the everlasting summer like he did into the cold, lets himself become a creature of leisure who pays no mind to the sun that used to kill men in this land before things like air conditioning and pools. But man is master now, and it’s easy enough for him to forget the passing of years, the months that run by like so many overflowing creeks and live on the surface of the world, unhaunted by the shadow of Cerberus.

Which is why it doesn’t surprise him, really. It’s been ten long years, but Persephone must always return to Hades. Michael is angry and afraid and bubbling full of love that he thought shriveled away years ago. It makes him dizzy, dizzy, like standing on a cliff’s edge. Trevor caught him, before, but this time he just lets him fall and fall and fall. Michael scrabbles for purchase and finds none. 

It’s shocking to see that Trevor has embraced the summer, too, has turned his back on the cold that used to anticipate their union and has made home in the desert. Michael doesn’t ask him about it. It seems like it would hurt too much.

And just like that, things are as they had been before. Michael and Trevor and Lester, planning and plotting and stealing, though now Michael as a protégée in tow (though sometimes he wonders who’s the real mentor between them) and Trevor has a blonde lapdog who’s about a quarter as useful and twenty times more annoying. He's old. So old. They all are. But still, they do as they did when they were boys. They bring Franklin into it and initiate him as they were initiated. The circle is unbroken. 

It snows that Christmas. They call it a disaster, evidence of the impending apocalypse, the final nail in the global climate change coffin. But Michael knows the truth, now. The earth turns and Persephone goes into the arms of her lover even though everything dies for the sake of their love, their wedding, the points of darkness where their skin meets and they fuse as hot tongues to ice cold surfaces. 

Michael is safe, at least until the flowers bloom.


End file.
